My first 6 months of starting a PhD

 Moving to Birmingham, UK was not very easy in the first place. I had to move all my stuff from Munich, Germany, back to my home country, Pakistan, and then move it to the UK. The most challenging part was to sort out all the visa issues and getting all the documents ready. I arrived in the UK on the 9th of October 2024 and started my job as an Early Stage Researcher in AIPT on the project NESTOR on 15th October. The initial few days were very good as I got introduced to the staff at AIPT and had initial meetings with my supervisors. 

Birmingham 2024

As the winters got extreme in the UK, the work started to pile up. Initially, I started with a literature review of all the work done in the domain of failure management in optical networks. We were able to identify a research gap that had not been explored yet in this area and decided to work on it. In the second week of December 2024, all the NESTOR DCs were invited to Lisbon, Portugal for an induction meeting of the project. It was one-day meeting involving talks from all the associated partners and introductory presentations from the DCs. The meeting was capped off by a dinner at a beautiful rooftop hotel. This meeting was a great opportunity to meet industry leaders in our field and get an idea of what they are working on and identify areas of potential collaborations. 

NESTOR Induction Meeting in Lisbon

The next 3 months were a mix of managing through the mostly harsh but sometimes pleasant Birmingham weather and getting some results ready for a publication. The NESTOR project also organised three training workshops for all the DCs on various topics in optical communications, one by TU Eindhoven, one by Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, and by Nokia (previously Infinera), Munich, Germany. By the end of March 2025, I had some results ready to be submitted for a publication in the ECOC 2025 conference, to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark in September 2025,  in coordination with my supervisors. So far, my experience at AIPT and at Aston has been amazing. I have been blessed with amazing colleagues and supervisors, who have been supportive from the start and I have had plenty of opportunities to enhance my soft skills as well due to the wide range of courses offered by the PGR department at Aston.